So, having purchased a sitting with a photographer at a charity auction during the year, Anne Marie calls and schedules the sitting. The photography studio is moving and the new place isn't ready, so the photographer asks if we'd rather he come to our house to shoot the pictures. Sounds like a great idea. We get our holiday decorations up, trim the tree in a particularly photogenic way, and the photographer shows up late on a Friday afternoon to shoot a hundred or so pictures (yes, with our crowd, you've got to kiss that many frogs to find anything close to a prince). The kids don't cooperate, they hate being dressed up, the phone rings, it's utter bedlam. After an hour and a half or so of root-canal level fun, the photographer goes on his way and Anne Marie and I look at each other and say, "Well, maybe there's one good shot in that bunch."

We'll never know. The photographer calls Saturday morning to say that he dropped his memory cards (yeah, digital photography, whatever) off at the lab, the lab computer had a virus, and all of the photographs are gone. Gone. Vanished. The good news ("Good news? Are you kidding me?") is that the photographer can come back that afternoon and we can go through the whole process again. We tell the kids, and Ellen cries. Cries. Real tears. But we get the photographer back out there, and after much ranting, raving, screaming, crying, running away, and tantrums (and that's just me), we finally get a shot we can use. Of course, we also got this keeper:

The best thing about this picture is that it truly captures the personalities of each of our daughters. Mary is the mischievious troublemaker, and her smart-alecky smirk is always hiding behind an innocent, "who, me?" expression. It's unusual to catch the smirk on film, though, which makes this picture fairly remarkable. Usually, whenever you hear a loud crash in our house, the next sound is Anne Marie or I yelling, "MARY!" Even if we're in a different part of the house, odds are it's her. Ellen's issues aren't her own making, and she does try hard to work through them, but she has a lot of difficulty dealing with a lot of things in her environment. When she was younger, it was loud sounds, bright lights, or other sensory overloads. She used to run whenever she saw a vacuum cleaner. Now, she can deal with those things better (she still can't stand the buzzer at Gina's basketball games, and she's pretty good at watching the clock to prepare for it), but she has a hard time with transitions in her life or being forced out of her routine. She was highly distressed and agitated, to the point of tears, when we had to re-sit for the Christmas photo. She actually inspired the photographer to try to "get it out of everyone's system" by taking a "mad" photo. What you see here is a common look for Ellen. Gina, on the other hand, is our sweet one. She does a great job of dealing with the trouble her two younger sisters cause. If you've ever seen a big old dog laying there while young pups climb all over her and chew on her ears, that's what we get with Gina. Here, she's gamely trying to help us get a good picture of the girls; "do you see what I've got to deal with here?"

So, that's about how we end 2005. We'll get together with as many of the Drummonds as we can on Christmas Eve in Houston and then spend Christmas Day with Anne Marie's mother, Marie. We'll be back in Dallas for New Year's and a visit from the "Alabama Drummonds" (Shawn and his family). Next year, we'll be back at it again.

To all of you, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a great, happy and healthy New Year.